LAROUCHE TO ARGENTINE JOURNALIST:

Fight the IMF for Americas To Survive

The following is the full text of Lyndon LaRouche's telephone interview on Oct. 12, 2004 with Romina Manguel of Veintitres magazine, of Argentina. Clips from an earlier interview (see EIR, Oct. 22, 2004) she had done with LaRouche were used in a movie documentary, "Debt," directed by the well-known Argentine television personality and journalist Jorge Lanata. "Debt" was released on Oct. 7, 2004, generating great interest in LaRouche in Argentina.

Q: Your statements in the documentary had a big impact, and many people have asked: "Who is this personality?" Can you tell us who you are?

LaRouche: I have been a Presidential candidate for the United States, and I'm now a political figure of the United States. I'm a prominent international economist, quite successful in long-term forecasting, pretty much over the last 40 years. And I'm something of a political figure internationally.

Q: Why are you interested in the international credit institutions? Since when? And why do those institutions have a particular interest in the Third World nations that suffer from them?

LaRouche: Essentially you are dealing with the same phenomenon that gave us Hitler and others between 1922 and 1945. It's a group of international financier circles, largely family circles on the Venetian fondo model. And these circles control most of the banking interests of Europe, and related interests, and also have spread, of course, into the Americas. These people actually are imperialist in their mentality.

Go back to the period between, say, 1000 A.D. and the 15th Century Renaissance, you will find that these Venetian families set up what is called an ultramontane system of banking, such as the Lombard banking system, which collapsed first in the Dark Ages of the 14th Century, but came back and had been responsible for the religious wars of 1511-1648 in Europe, and were the basis for the establishment of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, to which the United States was opposed.

So even though the United States is corrupted by this, the United States at its foundation was the creation of a republic to establish independence of these kinds of systems, plus the old Hapsburg system. And in the Americas, in countries like Argentina, especially after the period of the Lincoln victory in the Civil War in the United States, these countries became more and more republics modeled consciously upon the American System of political economy.

This is true in Mexico, in what became the process of the PRI [the Revolutionary Institutional Party]. It's true in Argentina. It came later, a tendency in this direction, in Brazil. It was also in Peru—a tendency in this direction. So, in the Americas, especially as consolidated under President Franklin Roosevelt, there was a sense of a system of republics based upon the model of the United States, and based on the idea of John Quincy Adams' drafting of the Monroe Doctrine. That is, a system of independent republics, cooperating with each other, in a mutual pact, like the Rio Pact that Franklin Roosevelt negotiated.

So what you have here, with respect to a country like Argentina, you have what is considered historically a treasonous faction in the United States, these kinds of financier interests, who are out to destroy the system of the Americas—which is not the British capitalist system; it's the American System. And you find in the constitution, and in the traditions of Argentina—although there are other traditions there too—you find that tradition. You find that in Mexico, in Franklin Roosevelt's relationship to the government of Mexico, the Cárdenas government. And you find it in Peru. You find the aspiration in the Americas for this kind of a system of republics.

And so the issue here is: You now have the international banking interests, the liberal bankers, which include New York bankers, who are part of this Venetian tradition. And these are the guys that gave us fascism between the Versailles Treaty and the end of World War II. These guys were never rooted out; they still exist inside the United States in a very powerful faction. They are a more powerful faction in Europe than they are in the United States. And we've come to a financial crisis, which is, their system is in crisis. And now they are back to the same business of trying to eliminate the sovereign nation-state, to loot the world, and all kinds of nasty things.

Q: Why did this subject interest you? How did you become interested in it and have this position, and involve yourself in a subject which, for many U.S. politicians, is an alien one, or which is only on the agenda before elections?

LaRouche: Oh, I came back from World War II, from service overseas, and I had gone overseas as a man in the footsteps of Franklin Roosevelt. That is, he was my President, and he had saved the United States. He was leading in saving the world from what was spreading across Europe: fascism. When I came back to the United States, in 1946, from overseas service, I saw a real right-wing turn in the United States, back towards precisely what we fought against in fascism.

As I came to know later in my study of this question, that on the day that Franklin Roosevelt died, under his successor, Harry Truman, the people who had created Hitler and people like that in Europe, the people behind Hitler, the bankers behind Hitler, the financier oligarchy behind Hitler, were back in power. They had actually owned the Nazi system. Some Nazis had been hung, or were being hung or whatnot, but they were back in power, with their money. They're still back in power.

What the problem is, is that the United States has been betrayed from within, by the influence of this kind of force. Eisenhower was a patriot, Truman was not. Jack Kennedy had question marks, but he did some good things. Johnson was essentially a patriot, but a frightened one after Kennedy's assassination. Nixon was evil, pure evil. He belonged to them. Carter was controlled by these people, although he didn't know it—the Trilateral Commission was a part of this. Reagan was a mixed bag. Reagan, on the one side, was like me—actually, ten years older than I am—like me, he was in the Roosevelt tradition, but he was brought over to this crazy liberal system. And then you had Bush. The first Bush was a part of the system. Clinton was a different case, and this Bush is a tool of the worst of this system.

So, I've simply been reacting as a patriot of my country to what I know to be my tradition, and against the resurgence of what we fought in World War II, which is now back again, and is trying to take over the world.

Q: Do you think that the average U.S. politician is aware of the costs to these countries of paying the debt? Do they know what the social cost is, of having to pay the debt, or are they not aware of it?

LaRouche: Most of the politicians in the United States and in Europe today are little men. They are not really qualified as leaders, patriotic leaders, of countries. They're not all bad people, but they're little men, and they tend to be opportunist in going along with what they believe they can succeed in doing for their benefit, to their own advantage, or for the advantage of their own circles. They have very little imagination, that is, political imagination. They are not great statesmen, like Solon of Athens. They're not great statesmen like Franklin Roosevelt or de Gaulle, for example, as an example of someone in Europe of the same type.

We don't have great men. Not great men in the sense of tyrants, but great men who have a vision, who are like Jeanne d'Arc in the case of France, who gave her life for a principle, and had a vision of the importance of this principle, as all great European and other leaders have had: the vision, a patriotic vision of what they must do for their nation, and also for the benefit of civilization in general. We do not have such leaders in the United States today. In that sense, I'm unique, at least at this time.

Q: The International Monetary Fund continuously terrorizes countries, talking about what the consequences would be of not paying the debt. Do you believe, in the realm of fiction, that it is possible for a country to not pay the debt to the Fund, and survive?

LaRouche: It's not possible to pay the debt to the IMF, and survive as nation-states. That's the situation today. The IMF has—since 1971 in particular, when Nixon took over and destroyed the fixed-exchange system, and that was at the Azores conference in 1972—set up this floating exchange-rate system. The IMF has become a tool of a predatory force of international financier circles. Now, we've got to the point that if we try to collect the debts, as they are now, civilization will vanish from the planet for some time to come. That is, it's not possible to collect the debts, and for civilization to survive.

That's what you see in Argentina. It's not possible for Argentina to pay this debt and for Argentina to survive physically as a nation and people. This is true also for the entirety of South and Central America. Very soon, sooner or later, but in the near future, every country in South and Central America will be destroyed, if the IMF has its way. And there will be genocide caused by this kind of thing. The kind of genocide that will remind historians of what happened in Europe during the 14th century.

So therefore, the choice is, either you meet the obligations imposed by the IMF and thus give up civilization, accept global genocide; or you say, no: The highest law of society is the maintenance of the welfare of the people, and the posterity and the sovereignty of nations, which is the principle of our Constitution here in the United States.

So, if we defend our Constitution, we say, the international financier circles, with their predatory power, have committed a crime against humanity. We are not going to honor the criminals. We will do justice, but we will do justice by starting by defending the sovereignty, the general welfare, and the posterity of our people.

Q: In the film documentary, you compared the dynamics of those institutions with the Gestapo, and that had an enormous impact. Can you amplify your reasoning on this a bit?

LaRouche: My point is, if you want to conquer a people—for example, you had the German people in a fit of fright and foolishness, endorse the adoption of a dictator, Adolf Hitler. Now, to prevent the German people from coming back, voluntarily, out from under the kind of dictatorship and schemes that Adolf Hitler represented, you create an instrument of terror, a police-state instrument of the type that John Ashcroft, the present Attorney General of the United States, would like to impose—is attempting to impose on the people. What you have, therefore, is the same thing. To impose the kind of dictatorial rule, by a predatory force, the international financial cartel, upon people, it is necessary to destroy the democratic rights of people, and to crush all of those people—either by exemplary actions of cruelty, or simply by eliminating persons who will stand up and fight.

Q: In light of this panorama, do you think that the Argentine leaders, the Argentine Presidents, who do not rebel against the policies of the Fund, are accomplices?

LaRouche: Not necessarily. They are in effect accomplices, but they're like the appointed leaders who are under the control of an overreaching power of compradores. They're the outside compradores typified by the Bank of Santander, which is a predatory instrument of Europe in South and Central America. And now, in a sense, with the IMF backing, and with backing from European governments and from the U.S. government, they have imposed a cruel dictatorship upon Argentina.

The question is, how do we fight? If a nation is not capable in and of itself to resist, then those of us, among all nations who understand justice, must intervene and must act, and establish our solidarity with the people of republics, to jointly work to defend them.

For example, what I'm doing in the United States: I know that there's no force on this planet today which could stop the worst depression the world has known, at least modern civilization, unless we save the Presidency of the United States. We have a candidate, John Kerry, who is not the best choice in the world, but is the only choice available to us, to defeat what George Bush and Cheney represent. My belief is that there's no one on the planet who has the combination of power and knowledge to defeat this monster, except the United States. Therefore, my view is that the United States must provide a leadership, like Franklin Roosevelt did during the 1930s and the war, a leadership which can reach out to other countries, which do not have the strength to defend themselves independently, and we must have solidarity with these countries and work together with them, to enable them to secure their rights.

Q: How responsible are the men in those institutions regarding what happens? I'm speaking of [former IMF Managing Director Michel] Camdessus, at one point, of [IMF First Deputy Managing Director] Anne Krueger. Or are they victims of the system in which they are immersed? How much responsibility can be ascribed to each one?

LaRouche: They're just as responsible as the Nazis, as the Nazi concentration camp administrator. They may not intend to kill people themselves, but they're employed in a position where that's the duty that's mandated on them, and they will do it. Some will resist, some will not do it. But they will do it. They are, in a sense, they're like pimps. They make their living that way. They make their career that way, and they may say they regret what they do, but they say: "I have to do it. I'm just doing my job." Like a mafia boss.

Q: Over the course of your most active political career. what do you think most irritated the credit institutions of the U.S. political Establishment?

LaRouche: I think two things are most notable. Number one, my exposure, my successful forecast, of what happened in 1971-72. The system was coming down, and the system did come down. The monetary system collapsed under Nixon, as I had forecast was probable.

Secondly, in the latter part of the 1970s, running for President and especially during the first term of President Reagan's term of office, I launched the initiation of what became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. At that time, there were leading political figures in Argentina, who were associated with me in defending that proposal, in the beginning of the 1980s; they didn't get much of a reward from the United States for that, though.

But these two things were considered a great threat to the policies of the oligarchy.

For example, it was not only the U.S. oligarchy. One has to remember that in 1986, when a section of the U.S. government deployed over 400 people in an operation against me and my associates, and had a force deployed to assassinate me, officially, where they had a force ready to come in where I was, and shoot everybody on sight, in the place where I was living, to get me. The Soviet government of Gorbachov was one of those who screamed loudest for my elimination, at the same time that the faction behind George Bush, Sr. was also pushing for my elimination. It was George Bush, Sr., of course, and his crowd, which put me into prison.

So I think it was these two things, my persistent action on this as typified by my intervention in 1976 on behalf of the just new world economic order, as in the Non-Aligned nations project in Ceylon, in Sri Lanka, at that time. That was number one. That was almost a death sentence for me. Number two, the SDI. That became almost a death sentence for me. These two things I have never been forgiven for by the oligarchy.

Q: Finally, what is your answer to your critics who, in an effort to discredit you, brand you a fanatic, delirious, a man of impossible ideas?

LaRouche: I don't pay much attention to these characters. Most of them are not honest, that is, they're not sincere. It's simply, they're repeating what somebody tells them to say. Most of this comes through the corrupt press, which is controlled by what are in fact the fascists of today—though some of the leading press has come over, in a sense, on my side, against the worst abuses. For example, the New York Times sometimes acts on issues in a way which I find favorable, and other people like that. In general, I give no credit to any of this stuff, because I know what it is, I know where it comes from. And frankly, I despise people who do that. They're beneath my dignity.

Q: I thank you greatly for this interview, which is going to be featured prominently in the magazine. The people of the LaRouche Youth also participated in this report.